


The Right Time

by CazBunny



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Azure Moon - Freeform, Dimitri just really loves Byleth, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, I Love Love, Idiots in Love, Oneshot, Oral Sex, Porn with a slight plot, Post-War, Slight Sylvain/Felix I just really love them, Smut, Spoilers, Sylvain Jose Gautier Being An Idiot, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, almost proposal, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:13:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22749901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CazBunny/pseuds/CazBunny
Summary: At the first Officer's Academy mock battle since the war, Dimitri reflects on his past, his relationship with Byleth, and the right time to pop the question.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 8
Kudos: 190





	The Right Time

High above the play warring of children, Dimitri stands with arms crossed, watching the battle unfold with little expression. Around him, the small entourage of his cabinet reminiscences on their own Academy victory, nearly a decade passed now. They do not seek his attention while they laugh or huff, in Felix’s case, which is fortunate. Dimitri does not remember when his class took the field in his youth and triumphed over the others. The happy memory of that day is sunk beneath the stench of acrid earth and spilled blood and his bellowing order to kill every living thing that stood between him and Edelgard. 

Below, a girl adorned in the yellow of the Golden Deer maneuvers away from the onslaught of a pegasus knight in the deep red of the Black Eagles, but the knight catches her across the back with a faux-lance. She goes down, facefirst, into the muck with a squeal.

On the precipice of the cliff, Manuela hisses and fists her hands against her eyes. At her side, Hanneman chuffs in pride while Alois peers at the field between the fingers covering his face. As it stands, victory seems assured for the Black Eagles with the Blue Lions fully and summarily routed and the Golden Deer on their last legs. 

It had been no easy thing to watch the Blue Lion house of his youth fall in battle, but Dimitri had been placated by the assurance that the Golden Deer would win overall. Now that it seems that is no longer the case, it is a hard thing to stand still and observe the mock battle with an impartial eye. It seems a cruel joke. On the gentle wind that dusts his bangs, the phantom laughter of his long-dead sister whispers. 

The warring of children subsides to the hellfire of that blasted day as the memories gnaw at his bones. He feels the slick of sweat across his brow, the coil of tension within his dominant arm, the animal hunger raging throughout the very core of his being. He has come not on the Archbishop’s insistence, but on the quest for Edelgard’s head. Her voice floats about his head, her fingers thread through his hair, mocking him, saying, _“You have got what you wanted. You have killed me.”_

Old wounds flare across his shoulder, over his eye, above his heart. If the attention of half the nation were not upon him, he would have hunched over until he found the method to banish the ghostly attentions of Edelgard. The medicine regime prescribed by medics and monks has helped to assuage the screams of those lost at Duscur, but Edelgard persists.

Footsteps approach, the sound of them barely above the chattering and the warring around him, but they interrupt the hiss of imagined laughter. He turns and finds himself smiling without effort or thought when he takes in her strong form and the toddler clinging to her side. 

_Byleth._

Her name in his thoughts is a gust of springtime. The guilt subsides. Edelgard fades. There is only her, quiet and clean and beautiful, before the world slips back into focus. 

In stark contrast to the nobles and monks around her, Byleth wears simple clothes of plain colors with no other accouterments, but she still manages to look like grace incarnate. For once, her hair has been fashioned above her head so that the curve of her neck is bared. She seems the Goddess herself, not merely an apprentice of the Archbishop. 

As all eyes follow her path to him, Dimitri cannot help but smile at the memory of the slack-jawed expressions at her refusal to immediately take the title of Archbishop. She had her reasons, and good reasons at that, to hold off on ascending to the title, but her decision had enacted chaos. There had been a mad scramble to name Seteth as acting Archbishop and then to outline the details of her training, and this was all _before_ she had thought to broach the subject of formal courtship between the king and Archbishop and, for a long while, it had been _hell._ But it had been worth it. 

There are still those, namely the older members of his cabinet, that claim themselves troubled by the announcement, but he gives their concerns little credence. They had been quick in forgiving him for his sins of slaughter and bloodshed yet remain staunch in their resistance to Byleth given her “heedless history,” as they put it. Nevermind that she had led the army to victory. Nevermind that she possesses the Crest of Flames. Nevermind that the Goddess’ power dwells within her. They threatened revolt when he broached the subject of naming her Queen Consort. 

So, he resolves to wait to further pursue her. But he will outlast them and he will see her crowned at his side before too long. If she will have him. 

In his pocket is the ring, once his late mother’s, he intends to name as proof of his devotion and love. In recent weeks, it has grown heavier and hotter, begging to be freed from the confines of dark pockets and hidden places. 

Byleth stares at him, shifting the boy from one hip to the other, and her eyes say, _the dead go unappeased,_ but her voice says, “I did not expect it to last this long. I find myself growing hungry.” 

For a fleeting moment, Dimitri sees himself reflected, muted and monstrous, in the boy’s brown eyes before the boy buries his face against Byleth’s shoulder. Already, he has forgotten the boy’s name, something with a soft beginning, though he has learned it only an hour prior when Byleth and Rhea had finally come to join them for the mock battle. 

_"An orphan,”_ Byleth had said at his stunned expression, _“I suppose he has taken a liking to me.”_

He watches her stroke the boy’s back in slow, easy motions, and fools himself into seeing a mop of blonde hair, straight and thin like his. Or, maybe, full and mint like hers with seafoam green eyes to match.

“Dimitri?” Byleth asks.

Ah, he has forgotten himself again. Never before had he considered a life or a family, but now the thoughts come sudden and unbidden. Because of her. 

He reddens, clears his throat. 

“I apologize,” he says. “I found myself lost in thought.”

Her hand stills on the boy’s back. She cocks her head with the smallest twitch as her lips wrinkle ever-so-slightly. There must be some tell, unknown to him, that draws her concern. She has been with him through the nightmares and the fits and the bad days; if he gives off a tell, she must be well familiar. 

“Good thoughts,” he says, but her expression remains unchanged. She studies him, seems on the verge of saying something, softly so the others cannot overhear, but the boy reaches a small, peach-sized fist to a strand of hair come loose from her bun and tugs, thoroughly derailing whatever she might have said.

Dimitri breathes a sigh of relief as he watches her do her best to unknot the boy’s fingers. Then, she looks to him, soft and pleading, with a wince of pain marring her face. 

Twisted in her locks, the boy’s hand is so small and delicate that his stomach twists in dread. If he broke one of the child’s fingers, how can he take it as anything other than a sign of his damnation? How could he continue to pretend he deserves her? How could he live with himself?

But Byleth begs him, silently with eyes more expressive than ever before, to help. So, he does. 

As the sound of a battle coming to a close rings out, Dimitri moves to her side. The boy does not notice, his face still buried against Byleth’s shoulder and his hand tugging and pulling. Dimitri reaches, grimaces, retreats, but Byleth draws him back with a small smile. She trusts him. He can’t fathom why, but she does. 

Dimitri is careful with the boy’s hand, treating it as he does the needlepoint he practices with Mercedes. He hooks his pointer finger around the boy’s hand and tugs. Once. Twice.

On the third tug, the boy’s hand unfurls like a flower in bloom and finds its way into the gummy maw of his mouth. Without the child’s pulling, Byleth’s smile has grown to encompass her full mouth and glistens the somber hollow of her eyes.

Emboldened, Dimitri takes the loose hair between thumb and pointer finger and guides it back along her head, searching for the pin that had held it originally. When he finds it, of course, he fumbles and the entire intricacy of her hairstyle unravels, falling about her head in heavy waves of green. 

And despite his shame for his uncoordinated hands and the buzzing memories of the war that remain, he longs to kiss her in the way that has eluded him since his arrival at Garreg Mach the day before. To kiss her and to touch her and to love her so thoroughly that she never finds herself with doubts. 

But now is not the time. Not when Hanneman lets out an uncharacteristic whoop and Seteth announces the Black Eagle house as victors and fragments of five years spent with death and bloodshed as bedfellows plague his thoughts. 

For now, he delivers a chaste kiss to her cheek and ruffles the boy’s hair, which shocks him nearly as much as it seems to shock her, and steels himself to congratulate the house that his sister had once led to revolution. 

The time would come to pledge his love and, when it did, he would be ready. Or, as ready as he could ever be.

* * *

A conversation heard in passing between the King’s Left and Right Hands after the mock battle has ended and the party has returned to Garreg Mach:

“It shouldn’t be long now.”

“I should hope not. It's getting damned disgusting watching him hem and haw around it.”

“Did you see the way he looked at her during the mock battle? That didn’t seem like he was hemming and hawing to me.”

“I try not to look. It’s disgusting.” 

“I didn’t realize love so thoroughly disgusts you. Perhaps I should _stop_ making goo-goo eyes at you whenever the mood strikes me? And stop sneaking into your quarters after dark? And stop making sweet, sweet love—”

“Sylvain.”

“Alright, alright. I’m just teasing. No need to get so blushy. It’s not like I’d actually be able to stay away for long. I mean, you’re just too damned cu… Wait, Felix! Where are you going? I’m just joking!”

* * *

Night finds Dimitri entertaining Byleth in his quarters, the same ones he had occupied during his days at the Academy. Unlike the rest of the monastery, the austere space conjures more happy memories than dour ones. Days spent trying and failing to study, evenings spent gritting his teeth at the sound emitting from Sylvain’s room, nights spent outlining his rule, predicting the lectures that awaited him, and, eventually, thinking of how best to ask Byleth to tea, to dinner, to dance, remembering the way the sunlight illuminated her face, imagining the softness of her body beneath the steel shell of her armor, allowing himself to dream of a day when he found his affections returned.

There were bad times, _horrible_ times, during his Academy days, but those were marked by periods of restless wandering and ceaseless sparring. Somehow, his quarters have remained untouched by the darkness of his past. Of course, there is also the possibility that Byleth’s presence and the things they do together within his quarters each time he visits has swayed his memories in some regards. Especially now that he lies at the mercy of her whims, bared before her in the cool of his room. 

"It has been so long,” she says. Her fingers trace the musculature of his chest, catching often on the lashes of scar that disfigure his torso. Once, he had been shy to her gaze, but that had been before the war had even ended when he had found himself taken with thoughts of charging Enbarr alone and soaked through with cold rain. 

“Too long,” he says, taking her soft face between the hard calluses and burn-scars of his hands and bringing her lips to meet him. He kisses her slowly, taking the time to acclimate to the plush of her love, but, as always, she surges ahead, taking his bottom lip between her teeth once before intensifying their kiss with deft tongue and crushing pressure. When she asserts herself like this, he cannot help but consider the possibility that she is baiting him to fight against her, to take control and establish dominance over her. But he never does, the thought of breaking her far too frightening to justify the allure of introducing his strength into their love-making. 

As they kiss, Dimitri shifts his hands from her jaw, tracing his fingers down the curve of her neck, fanning them over her shoulders and down the ridge of her back. When she breaks their kiss and sits back, he scowls until she slinks free of her top and then unhooks her brassiere. 

“Beautiful,” he says, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her back down. Fully unclothed from the waist up, she is hot against him, warming the flesh of him that has remained stubbornly cold. 

He kisses the column of her neck, taking time to languish over the spots that make her shiver, especially the juncture of her throat and shoulder. He is careful not to paint her in love bites, though the thought of her marked as undeniably _his_ makes his fingers dig just a little bit harder into the smooth of her back. 

She stops his descent, taking his face between her hands, but he will not be so easily dissuaded. He takes each of her fingers into his mouth, taking his time in slickening them with his spit and tongue. Though she makes no noise and gives no expression, her eyes grow darker with each swirl of his tongue. When she draws from his mouth to wrap her warm, wet hand around the length of him, a groan resonates through his chest. 

And Byleth slows, stops, and, when he jerks up into her hand, begging without words for her continued touch, she says, “Hush. I will not stand to be humiliated at breakfast by Sylvain again.” 

He nods and bites his lip, but there a grunt of pleasure still escapes him at her touch. He has never been well-disciplined when it comes to her. Thankfully, she is forgiving.

Her grip is tight but smooth as she pumps him and coaxes the strains and evils of the day from his sore, tense body. Knelt over top of him with hair and breasts free and bouncing, she is glorious. Even in the silvery moonlight, her body is definitively sleek and toned. The length of him twitches in her hand as his thoughts begin to blur from the sensation of her hand.

Caught in her grasp, he stretches to touch her and return the favor before she has even fully given it, but he only manages a cursory swipe over the clothed apex of her thighs before she bats his hand away. Then, she descends, taking him in her mouth before he can even consider the possibility of her doing so. 

While it is not the first time she has taken him in her mouth, it takes him by surprise just as it did that first time when he had finally permitted her to attempt it. It is debasing, animalistic, but the sheer knowledge that she would debase herself in such a way for him is dizzying. Often, when he is away from her, he has been able to cum to the thought of that alone. 

He buries one hand in the mess of her hair and the other he uses to grip the bed and keep himself from rutting into her mouth. She doesn’t tease him as she has in the past and he is grateful. He has spent so long with only the coarseness of his hand for company that he knows too much teasing would only serve to infuriate him. It isn’t long before he tears the sheets from the bed with a crying moan and cums hard and sudden. And she takes it without flinching, swallowing the last of it and stroking his legs as he comes down from the high. 

“You are too good to me,” he says when he can finally find the strength to speak. She scowls and shakes her head.

“Enough of that,” she says and hops off of the bed and onto the floor. 

Dimitri props himself up on an elbow and watches her shimmy free of her lounge pants, relishing the intimacies of her form that are for his gaze alone. When she hisses at something hard caught underfoot, he enjoys the view of her bent to retrieve the offensive object. Until she reveals the emerald ring he has kept hidden to the light and his heart drops straight through his body, leaving him shocked with fright. 

“Dimitri?” 

What can he say? His thoughts are a slush of curses and self-depreciation. How could he have been so foolish to leave it where it could be so easily found? Why didn’t he bury it in his drawer of undergarments? He _knew_ she would come to visit him, knew she would—

“Dimitri, what is this?” 

Her voice wobbles from its usual monotone. She holds the ring as if she intends to cast it away at a moment’s notice. 

“It was my mother’s,” he says, lamely, and he shifts from the bed, moving through the mess of discarded clothes they have created to stand before her. She holds it up to him and he takes it, hides it away in his fist. 

“Are you planning to…”

She trails off, leaving the word unsaid. Her cheeks are flushed, but he cannot remember if they were before her unfortunate discovery. 

“Yes,” he says. His heart beats so quickly that he feels he might induce himself to vomit. His face burns as he attempts to calm his breathing, timing it with the open and close of his unused fist. 

He does not know what to think when she merely nods. When she pries his fingers apart to pluck the ring from within them. When she returns the ring to the pocket of his trousers. When she stares with her endless eyes and does not speak. When she lurches at him with such force that he loses his balance, slamming back onto the bed as her mouth and hands assail him with wet kisses and hard touch. 

“I love you,” she says, blazing a trail of kisses along his jaw until she reaches his ear. Then, she nips, sucks, laves her tongue against the sore flesh when she bites too hard. 

“I love you too,” he says. As she continues her ministrations, moving on to bless his neck with her tongue and teeth, he lets his head lull and brings his hands to cup her breasts, massaging the dense flesh with the rough flats of his thumbs. 

“I will propose to you properly,” he says and his arousal deepens his voice, making it into a low growl. He takes her nipples between his fingers, rolls them with increasing pressure until she gasps and her head falls back so that her hair spills wild and messy over her shoulders.

“In front of everyone.”

He shifts his grip to her hips and then wrestles her onto her back. She goes without a fight, lying flat and submissive until he takes one of her breasts into his mouth and she arches against him. He swirls his tongue over the hard peak of her nipple, delivering a rough, hard lick that leaves her rutting up against him.

What would the congregation think, knowing that their future Archbishop could be so completely undone like this? 

Dimitri kisses through the cavern between her breasts as he shifts his attention to her other, unattended breast. 

“In front of all of Fodlan.” 

In every other instance, Byleth is the paragon of patience, but never here. It brings him a roiling thrill to know that he is the only one to witness this wild, untethered side of her. She snatches his wrist, yanks it down over her belly, between her legs, where the sheer undergarment she wears is utterly soaked. It has taken time and practice, but he knows precisely how to touch her to make her writhe. 

And he does so, casting aside the wet rag of her undergarments and rubbing the sensitive bud at the apex of her thighs until her nails scour his back. She jerks up against his palm, nearly bucking his fingers free of her, so he holds her hip flush against the mattress with his unoccupied hand. She doesn’t moan like he is so apt to do, but her breathing is a clue. Once her whole body flushes with heaving breath, he knows she is close. He skates his fingers off her clit and she hisses until he hooks them within the wet warmth of her. And, though it saps finesse from his pumping fingers, he strokes the curve of her face with the back of his free hand and swipes his thumb over her swollen, parted lips. 

She is so beautiful, whether completely put together and pristine for public appearances or made flushed and breathless like this. Even as his wrist cramps and his fingers ache, he considers himself lucky and blessed to have her: his own personal goddess. 

Dimitri removes his fingers and sucks the sweetness of her from them. Immediately, Byleth shifts beneath him, hooking her legs around his waist and taking him in her hand. She pumps him once, twice, and then she guides him into her. And she is so tight and warm and wet and fucking wonderful. 

He curses and drops his head against the mattress just beside her ear, biting his lip as he takes her with slow restraint. Thankfully, she adjusts quickly and bucks her hips to take him fully before his patience wears thin. 

“I love you,” he says, supporting his words with a passionate kiss and the beginnings of a steady rhythm. 

“I love you too,” she says, looping her arms over his neck and grinding against him. His forehead rests against hers and he swallows her breaths as she releases them. There is more he wants to say, but the words stay glued in his chest, held there by the heat of passion as his thoughts give way to instinct. He thrusts into her, picking up speed and intensity, and he rubs hard against her clit with his thumb. She kisses at his neck, but, soon, her kisses give way to breaths turned molten and heavy, punctuating the lurid sound of their lovemaking. 

As she reaches her peak, he follows soon after, thrusting in stunted, harsh motions, even after he has been fully spent. In the aftermath, he slumps against her, careful, even in his lusty haze, to distribute his weight so that he doesn’t smother her, and rests his head over her chest. Her fingers move through his hair, shifting the cord of his eyepatch in the process and massaging every inch of his tender scalp. 

"Stay the night,” he says, running the back of his hand over the center of her belly. “Sleep beside me.” 

She hums and the sound tickles his ear. 

“But I am not your wife or even your betrothed—”

He lifts his head from her chest and his eyepatch risks slipping, but he catches it before it can reveal the scar tissue beneath. Uncowed, he takes her face in hand, kisses her softly while stroking her cheek and says, “That can be solved.”

But she laughs, her mouth drawn up in a smirk. His goodwill plummets. He loves her, immensely and completely. It defines his entire being, even if it shouldn’t. If she denies him, refuses to give her hand, then he will have to remake himself, always plagued by the love he has captured and lost just as quickly. 

When Byleth softens, the hard humor in her face giving way to serenity, he finds himself able to breathe again. She smoothens the hair of his brow and says, “Do it properly. When the time is right.” 

Dimitri sighs and takes to tracing the contours of her waist once more. He kisses the jut of her collarbone and thinks of how the right time could not come fast enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Y'ALL. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE THREE WORKS IN PROGRESS BUT INSTEAD OF WORKING ON THEM YOU CRANK OUT A ONESHOT UNRELATED TO ANY OF THEM BECAUSE VALENTINE'S DAY REALLY HIT YOU HARD. I have no good excuse for writing this. I just wanted to write smut (& omfg this is the most explicit thing I've ever written) and a more realistic proposal than the game gives us.  
> I love this because you can very much see how I was like okay, Dimitri Sad Boi Hours and the Lasting Guilt of killing Edelgard and then went, okay Time for Smut LMAO.  
> To anyone waiting on an update for my other fics, I suck, I know. I am sorry but THERE WILL BE AN UPDATE SOON I STG LIKE I PROMISE!!!  
> This is shameless, but I hope y'all enjoy!!!!!!!!! As always, feel free to drop a comment and lemme know what you think!  
> You can also find me on Tumblr at CazBunnyWrites!


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